Kipps The Story of a Simple Soul

KIPPS

made Ann protest. She had come so far towards a proper conception of Kipps’ social position as to admit the prospect of one servant –”but lor’!” she would say, “you’d want a manservant in this ‘ouse.” When the houses were not too big, then they were almost invariably the product of speculative building, of that multitudinous hasty building for the extravagant multitude of new births that was the essential disaster of the nineteenth century. The new houses Ann refused as damp, and even the youngest of these that had been in use showed remarkable signs of a sickly constitution, the plaster flaked away, the floors gaped, the paper mouldered and peeled, the doors dropped, the bricks scaled and the railings rusted, Nature in the form of spiders, earwigs, cockroaches, mice, rats, fungi and remarkable smells, was already fighting her way back....

And the plan was invariably inconvenient, invariably. All the houses they saw had a common quality for which she could find no word, but for which the proper word is incivility. “They build these ‘ouses,” she said, “as though girls wasn’t ‘uman beings.” Sid’s social democracy had got into her blood perhaps, and anyhow they went about discovering the most remarkable inconsiderateness in the contemporary house. “There’s kitching stairs to go up, Artie!” Ann would say. “Some poor girl’s got to go up and down, up and down, and be tired out, jest because they haven’t the sense to leave enough space to give their steps a proper rise – and no water upstairs anywhere – every drop got to be carried! It’s ‘ouses like this wear girls out.

“It’s ‘aving ‘ouses built by men, I believe, makes all the work and trouble,” said Ann....

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The Kippses, you see, thought they were looking for a reasonably simple little contemporary house, but indeed they were looking either for dreamland or 1975 A.D. or thereabouts, and it hadn’t come.

III

But it was a foolish thing of Kipps to begin building a house. He did that out of an extraordinary animosity for house

agents he had conceived.

Everybody hates house agents just as everybody loves sailors. It is no doubt a very wicked and unjust hatred, but the business of a novelist is not ethical principle but facts. Everybody hates house agents because they have everybody at a disadvantage. All other callings have a certain amount of give and take; the house agent simply takes. All other callings want you; your solicitor is afraid you may change him, your doctor cannot go too far, your novelist – if only you knew it – is mutely abject towards your unspoken wishes – and as for your tradespeople, milkmen will fight outside your front door for you, and green-grocers call in tears if you discard them suddenly; but who ever heard of a house agent struggling to serve anyone? You want to get a house; you go to him, you dishevelled and angry from travel, anxious, enquiring; he calm, clean, inactive, reticent, quietly doing nothing. You beg him to reduce rents, whitewash ceilings, produce other houses, combine the summer house of No. 6 with the conservatory of No. 4 – much he cares! You want to dispose of a house; then he is just the same,

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serene, indifferent – on one occasion I remember he was picking his teeth all the time he answered me. Competition is a mockery among house agents, they are all alike, you cannot wound them by going to the opposite office, you cannot dismiss them, you can at most dismiss yourself. They are invulnerably placed behind mahogany and brass, too far usually even for a sudden swift lunge with an umbrella, and to throw away the keys they lend you instead of returning them is larceny and punishable as such.

It was a house agent in Dover who finally decided Kipps to build. Kipps, with a certain faltering in his voice, had delivered his ultimatum, no basement, not more than eight rooms, hot and cold water upstairs, coal cellar in the house but with intervening doors to keep dust from the scullery and so forth. He stood blowing. “You’ll have to build a house,” said the house agent, sighing wearily, “if you want all that.” It was rather for the sake of effective answer than with any intention at the time that Kipps mumbled, “That’s about what I shall do – this goes on.”

Whereupon the house agent smiled. He smiled!

When Kipps came to turn the thing over in his mind he was surprised to find quite a considerable intention had germinated and was growing up in him. After all, lots of people have built houses. How could there be so many if they hadn’t? Suppose he “reely” did! Then he would go to the house agent and say, “’Ere, while you been getting me a sootable ‘ouse, blowed if I ‘aven’t built one!” Go round to all of them; all the house agents in Folkestone, in Dover, Ashford, Canterbury, Margate, Ramsgate, saying that! Perhaps then they might

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be sorry. It was in the small hours that he awoke to a realisation that he had made up his mind in the matter.

“Ann,” he said, “Ann,” and also used the sharp of his elbow. Ann was at last awakened to the pitch of an indistinct en-

quiry what was the matter.

“I’m going to build a house, Ann.” “Eh?” said Ann, suddenly, as if awake. “Build a house.”

Ann said something incoherent about he’d better wait until the morning before he did anything of the sort, and immediately with a fine trustfulness went fast asleep again.

But Kipps lay awake for a long while building his house, and in the morning at breakfast he made his meaning clear. He had smarted under the indignities of house agents long enough, and this seemed to promise revenge – a fine revenge. “And, you know, we might reely make rather a nice little ‘ouse out of it – like we want.”

So resolved, it became possible for them to take a house for a year, with a basement, no service lift, blackleading to do everywhere, no water upstairs, no bathroom, vast sash windows to be cleaned from the sill, stone steps with a twist and open to the rain into the coal cellar, insufficient cupboards, unpaved path to the dustbin, no fireplace to the servant’s bedroom, no end of splintery wood to scrub – in fact, a very typical English middle-class house. And having added to this house some furniture, and a languid young person with unauthentic golden hair named Gwendolen, who was engaged to a sergeant-major and had formerly been in an hotel, having “moved in” and spent some sleepless nights varied by noctur-

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nal explorations in search of burglars, because of the strangeness of being in a house for which they were personally responsible, Kipps settled down for a time and turned himself with considerable resolution to the project of building a home.

IV

At first Kipps had gathered advice, finding an initial difficulty in how to begin. He went into a builder’s shop at Seabrook one day, and told the lady in charge that he wanted a house built; he was breathless but quite determined, and he was prepared to give his order there and then, but she temporised with him and said her husband was out, and he left without giving his name. Also he went and talked to a man in a cart who was pointed out to him by a workman as the builder of a new house near Saltwood, but he found him first sceptical and then overpoweringly sarcastic. “I suppose you build a ‘ouse every ‘oliday,” he said, and turned from Kipps with every symptom of contempt.

Afterwards Carshot told alarming stories about builders, and shook Kipps’ expressed resolution a good deal, and then Pierce raised the question whether one ought to go in the first instance to a builder at all and not rather to an architect. Pierce knew a man at Ashford whose brother was an architect, and as it is always better in these matters to get someone you know, the Kippses decided, before Pierce had gone, and Carshot’s warning had resumed their sway, to apply to him. They did so – rather dubiously.

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The architect who was brother of Pierce’s friend appeared as a small, alert individual with a black bag and a cylindrical silk hat, and he sat at the dining-room table, with his hat and his bag exactly equidistant right and left of him, and maintained a demeanour of impressive woodenness, while Kipps on the hearthrug, with a quaking sense of gigantic enterprise, vacillated answers to his enquiries. Ann held a watching brief for herself, in a position she had chosen as suitable to the occasion beside the corner of the carved oak sideboard. They felt, in a sense, at bay.

The architect began by asking for the site, and seemed a little discomposed to discover this had still to be found. “I thought of building just anywhere,” said Kipps. “I ‘aven’t made up my mind about that yet.” The architect remarked that he would have preferred to see the site in order to know where to put what he called his “ugly side,” but it was quite possible of course to plan a house “in the air,” on the level, “simply with back and front assumed” – if they would like to do that. Kipps flushed slightly, and secretly hoping it would make no great difference in the fees, said a little doubtfully that he thought that would be all right.

The architect then marked off as it were the first section of his subject, with a single dry cough, opened his bag, took out a spring tape measure, some hard biscuits, a metal flask, a new pair of dogskin gloves, a clockwork motor-car partially wrapped in paper, a bunch of violets, a paper of small brass screws, and finally a large, distended notebook; he replaced the other objects carefully, opened his notebook, put a pencil to his lips and said: “And what accommodation

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will you require?” To which Ann, who had followed his every movement with the closest attention and a deepening dread, replied with the violent suddenness of one who has long lain in wait, “Cubbuds!”

“Anyhow,” she added, catching her husband’s eye. The architect wrote it down.

“And how many rooms?” he said, coming to secondary matters.

The young people regarded one another. It was dreadfully like giving an order.

“How many bedrooms, for example?” asked the architect. “One?” suggested Kipps, inclined now to minimise at

any cost.

“There’s Gwendolen,” said Ann.

“Visitors perhaps,” said the architect, and temperately, “You never know.”

“Two, p’raps?” said Kipps. “We don’t want no more than a little ‘ouse, you know.”

“But the merest shooting-box – ,” said the architect.

They got to six; he beat them steadily from bedroom to bedroom, the word “nursery” played across their imaginative skies – he mentioned it as the remotest possibility – and then six being reluctantly conceded, Ann came forward to the table, sat down and delivered herself of one of her prepared conditions: “’Ot and cold water,” she said, “laid on to each room – any’ow.”

It was an idea long since acquired from Sid.

“Yes,” said Kipps, on the hearthrug, “’Ot and cold water laid on to each bedroom – we’ve settled on that.”

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It was the first intimation to the architect that he had to deal with a couple of exceptional originality, and as he had spent the previous afternoon in finding three large houses in The Builder, which he intended to combine into an original and copyright design of his own, he naturally struggled against these novel requirements. He enlarged on the extreme expensiveness of plumbing, on the extreme expensiveness of everything not already arranged for in his scheme, and only when Ann declared she’d as soon not have the house as not have her requirements, and Kipps, blenching the while, had said he didn’t mind what a thing cost him so long as he got what he wanted, did he allow a kindred originality of his own to appear beneath the acquired professionalism of his methods. He dismissed their previous talk with his paragraphic cough. “Of course,” he said, “if you don’t mind being unconventional –”

He explained that he had been thinking of a Queen Anne style of architecture (Ann directly she heard her name shook her head at Kipps in an aside) so far as the exterior went. For his own part, he said, he liked to have the exterior of a house in a style, not priggishly in a style, but mixed, with one style uppermost, and the gables and dormers and casements of the Queen Anne style, with a little rough cast and sham timbering here and there and perhaps a bit of an overhang diversified a house and made it interesting. The advantages of what he called a Queen Anne style was that it had such a variety of features.... Still, if they were prepared to be unconventional it could be done. A number of houses were now built in the unconventional style and were often very pretty. In the uncon-

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ventional style one frequently had what perhaps he might call Internal Features, for example, an Old English oak staircase and gallery. White rough-cast and green paint were a good deal favoured in houses of this type.

He indicated that this excursus on style was finished by a momentary use of his cough, and reopened his notebook, which he had closed to wave about in a moment of descriptive enthusiasm while expatiating on the unbridled wealth of External Features associated with Queen Anne. “Six bedrooms,” he said, moistening his pencil. “One with barred windows suitable for a nursery if required.”

Kipps endorsed this huskily and reluctantly.

There followed a most interesting discussion upon house building, in which Kipps played a minor part. They passed from bedrooms to the kitchen and scullery, and there Ann displayed an intelligent exactingness that won the expressed admiration of the architect. They were particularly novel upon the position of the coal cellar, which Ann held to be altogether too low in the ordinary house, necessitating much heavy carrying. They dismissed as impracticable the idea of having coal cellar and kitchen at the top of the house, because that would involve carrying all the coal through the house, and therewith much subsequent cleaning, and for a time they dealt with a conception of a coal cellar on the ground floor with a light staircase running up outside to an exterior shoot. “It might be made a Feature,” said the architect, a little doubtfully, jotting down a note of it. “It would be apt to get black, you know.”

Thence they passed to the alternative of service lifts, and then by an inspiration of the architect to the possibilities of gas

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heating. Kipps did a complicated verbal fugue on the theme, “gas heating heats the air,” with variable aspirates; he became very red and was lost to the discussion altogether for a time, though his lips kept silently on.

Subsequently the architect wrote to say that he found in his notebook very full and explicit directions for bow windows to all rooms, for bedrooms, for water supply, lift, height of stairs and absence of twists therein, for a well-ventilated kitchen twenty feet square, with two dressers and a large box-win- dow seat, for scullery and outhouses and offices, but nothing whatever about drawing-room, dining-room, library or study, or approximate cost, and he awaited further instructions. He presumed there would be a breakfast-room, dining-room, drawing-room, and study for Mr. Kipps, at least that was his conception, and the young couple discussed this matter long and ardently.

Ann was distinctly restrictive in this direction. “I don’t see what you want a drawin’-room and a dinin’ and a kitchen for. If we was going to let in summer – well and good. But we’re not going to let. Consequently we don’t want so many rooms. Then there’s a ‘all. What use is a ‘all? It only makes work. And a study!”

Kipps had been humming and stroking his moustache since he had read the architect’s letter. “I think I’d like a little bit of a study – not a big one, of course, but one with a desk and book-shelves, like there was in Hughenden. I’d like that.” It was only after they had talked to the architect again and seen how scandalised he was at the idea of not having a draw-

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